Paul Salzman

English prose fiction 1558-1700 : a critical history

The period from the accession of Elizabeth to the end of the l7th century is considered one of the high points of English drama and poetry. It was also a time when many forms of prose fiction developed, from popular chivalric romances and chapbooks to picaresque narratives and sophisticated romance forms--works which were the forerunners of the novel. This volume is the first comprehensive study of the prose fiction written or translated in England during this period. It combines a historical survey with a critical study of representative texts, both familiar works such as Sidneys Arcadia and little-known ones such as Mary Wroths Urania (1621), the first prose fiction written by a woman in England. Salzman analyzes in detail the various prose forms of the period, focusing on specific examples, and examines the different audiences for these works and the influence of increasing literacy on the range of fiction produced.

Reading early modern women's writing

Introduction: Were They That Name? Categorizing Early Modern Womens Writing 1. The Scope of Early Modern Womens Writing 2. Poets High and Low, Visible and Invisible 3. Mary Wroth: From Obscurity to Canonization 4. Anne Clifford: Writing a Family Identity 5. Prophets and Visionaries 6. Margaret Cavendish and Lucy Huchinson: Authorship and Ownership 7. Saint and Sinner: Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn Conclusion

Transformations of Romance

Literary historians used to see the seventeenth century as a period of steady decline for the romance form. In recent years there has been an increasing realisation that a variety of important developments took place in the romance in the course of the seventeenth century.1 Two of the most remarkable of these romances were published in 1621: Mary Wroth’s huge, elaborate arcadian romance, Urania, and John Barclay’s Argenis, a Latin political romance soon afterwards translated into English. Both romances, while very different in nature, share a complex interest in the intersection of the public and private spheres.

Introduction: Redeeming the Editorial Tradition

Salzman argues that through the process of their editing, editors, in the course of the nineteenth century, constructed the concept of a body or canon of Renaissance literature. This is especially the case with Complete Editions, as opposed to the anthologies common in the eighteenth century. Salzman argues that the nineteenth-century editorial tradition as a whole has been neglected, and that Shakespeare editing, while less neglected, needs to be set in the context of the editing of early modern literature in general.

Constructing a Perfected Shakespeare Text

In Chap. 3 Salzman examines the career of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. Together with his skilled wife Henrietta, Halliwell was perhaps the most adventurous nineteenth-century editor, moving between texts that were previously considered to be ephemeral, such as jest-books, and a project like his massive folio Shakespeare edition and his Shakespeare biography. Halliwell’s working methods are analysed in detail, especially his use of scrapbooks which contained, among other things, cuttings from original early modern books.

Conclusion: Forgetting the Past

Chapter 6 looks in detail at current theoretical issues surrounding editing, book history, and questions surrounding the transmission of early modern texts. The chapter argues that current debates need to be set in the context of the history of editing.

Scientific Professionals and Learned Amateurs

Chapter 5 focuses on two significant publication events at the beginning of the twentieth century: R.B. McKerrow’s edition of Thomas Nashe, and Montague Summers’s edition of Aphra Behn. The chapter places the shift towards the so-called New Bibliography in the context of the editorial history analysed in the preceding chapters. As the same time, this chapter draws together some connections between the history of editing and the recognition of the significance of early modern women’s writing.

Amateurs, Professionals, and the Second Half of the Century

Chapter 4 analyses changing approaches to the editing of Shakespeare from attempts to produce an authoritative edition through to more experimental approaches. While an editor like Alexander Grosart exemplifies a late version of nineteenth-century ‘amateur’ editing, A.H. Bullen is considered as exemplifying a shift towards a more commercial view of the editing process. This chapter also contrasts the editing of Renaissance literature with approaches to the editing of pre-Renaissance literature.

Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1550–1700 by Susan Wiseman (review)

Part IV starts with Ann Christensen’s discussion of ‘absent husbands and unpartnered wives’ (p. 272). Expanding commercial activities in the New World necessitated that men travel away from their family homes and Christensen investigates this domestic phenomenon through conduct literature and guides to merchant travel. Bernadette Andrea examines the presence of Islamic women in early modern Britain. Andrea argues that these women were not exotic curiosities but had a far-reaching and influential impact on British culture. Finally, Sheila T. Cavanagh examines how the untimely, suspicious death of Amy Robsart (the wife of Lord Robert Dudley) informs a twenty-first-century appetite for celebrity gossip. Mapping Gendered Routes and Spaces is an important contribution to understanding gender diversity in the early modern period. The volume also goes further by applying this diversity to global history and spatial awareness to invite further study.

Me and My Shadow: Editing Wroth for the Digital Age

In 1978, I was a miserable, homesick, cold graduate student working in Cambridge on a PhD that my supervisor considered to be absurd, unfinishable, and unexaminable. (“Just not a Cambridge PhD,” he kept telling me.) In the course of doggedly reading all the prose fiction written in the seventeenth century, I had come across Mary Wroth’s Urania, which I treated initially as nothing more exciting than yet another romance indebted to Sidney’s Arcadia. The great attraction of Urania was that King’s College had a copy of it, so that I could read it far more easily than the numerous works I had been reading on microfilm, and usually negative microfilm at that. I also read the manuscript continuation of Urania in a copy kindly supplied to me by Katherine Duncan-Jones. The price for that was being inadvertently caught in the middle of one of many disputes between Duncan-Jones and Peter Croft, the irascible librarian at King’s, who disagreed about everything, including whether or not the Urania manuscript was in Wroth’s hand. In an example of what I would now refer to as distracted reading, I seized on the idea that Urania contained allusions to Jacobean scandals, something that had been noted by the sparse existing critical commentary on Wroth’s romance from the DNB, Brigid McCarthy, and, in a brief 1975 piece by Graham Parry.1 Reference was made to the exchange between Wroth and Edward Denny over the depiction in Urania of Denny’s family scandal involving his daughter Honora.